Among the different techniques introduced for analyzing semi-competing risks data, we adopt an illness-death model to jointly exploit the information on terminal and non-terminal events of interest. More details on illustration of this setting can be found in [1]} and [2]}. Illness-death model is a particular form of multi-state modeling approach in which patients' starting state is an initial condition where they are at risk of either moving to the state of a non-terminal event prior to moving to the absorbing state or directly transitioning to the terminal state. They can also move from the non-terminal state to the terminal one.
